Youth in Revolt was set first to open this fall, but it was a smart move to wait: It's a sweetly dippy underachiever better suited to small-stakes January. Taken from C.D. Payne's early '90s epistolary novel, Youth in Revolt chronicles the tortured life of Nick Twisp (Michael Cera). >More

When Edgar Allan Poe invented the literary detective genre in 1841, little did he know that C. Auguste Dupin, his clever little Parisian "ratiocinator," would lead directly to the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle's "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes some 46 years later. >More

More corsets appear in the movie Nine than in your average Victoria's Secret fashion show. The movie is Rob Marshall's adaptation of the twice-produced Broadway musical, which itself was an outgrowth of Federico Fellini's 1963 Italian film classic 8 1/2. >More

As awards season kicks into high gear, commentators of all stripes are going to talk about Up in the Air in terms of its zeitgeist relevance, its timely attention to economic instability and the corporations that feast on the carrion of the downsized and dispossessed. And in so doing, they will overlook how simply satisfying it is as a piece of filmmaking. >More

Nancy Meyers probably wasn't going for irony with the title of her new comedy It's Complicated. If you've followed her career as writer and director over the past 30 years, however, you'd realize that "complicated" isn't exactly the word that best describes her work. >More

At 162 minutes and a cost of somewhere between $250 and $300 million, James Cameron's Avatar is both a spectacular slab of virtually nonstop action and an unmistakable diatribe against corporatized American imperialism. >More

Like its title protagonist -- a sexually, emotionally and physically abused 16-year-old African American girl who is functionally illiterate, morbidly obese and pregnant with her second child fathered by her own father -- Precious is a rough-hewn entity with unlikely odds for success. >More

The Princess and the Frog, Disney's 49th animated feature film, is a riot of oozing ultraviolets, dank graveyard blacks and incandescent star-field blues, a palette that seems more fit for All Hallows Eve than the holiday season. >More